Segregation in PS

[dimaq]

Since the \"Racism in PS\" thread has grown too long-winded, allow me to start a new one.

Namely should there be provisions in the game to naturally segregate the Yliakim populace into groups based on genetic properties - i.e. race and sex.

Or the opposite should there be rules against such segregation.

An example of earlier could be, for example having different meals that characters naturally consume - e.g. gravel porridge for Krans, rat soup for Enki or clear fish broth for Klyros; that require different engredient found in different domains in the world, thus creating natural habitats for the races. Provision in a game would be if the character received more strength/pleasure/etc from eating native food than foreign.

An example of the latter would be, e.g. a GM-enforced prohibition of single-race guilds or abundance of quests that can only be completed by a \"multi-national\" group.

[Seytra]

The food example IMO doesn\'t require a pro-segregation rule. It has biologicel / chemical reasons, and it would be unrealistic to not have it. However, I don\'t thinkt hat these things would be unattainable anywhere. In some places, it might be slightly harder / more expensive to come by, but it wouldn\'t warrant segregation. Instead, it would stimulate the economy by creating need for travelling merchants, which is also a good thing. I don\'t think that gender would be important, though, as there is not enough detail in PS to validate something like that, and it would be tedious and cumbersome to have anyway.

GM-enforced prohibition of single-race guilds would IMO be a good thing, though it must not be required to have members of different races, only that you take them if they qualify (quotas :rolleyes:). This does, AFAICS, mix very well with the different food requirements.

I\'m wary of quests that can only be completed by having different races, as this would be quota-like and would also remove freedom to choose the race / species that one prefers. On the same note, this also applies to quests that require a mixture of professions, as this ends up in players choosing a profession that they don\'t really want just to be able to participate, which IMO is bad.
I think that almost every quest should be solvable by anyone (or combination of, if it\'s a group quest). They might be harder for some configurations, but shouldn\'t be made to be impossible to solve.

[Clover]

I didn\'t keep up with the \'racism\' thread but GM enforced de-segregation is foolish, plain and simple.  And the food thing,  well none of the races came from Yliakum so none of the food found here would likely be native.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Clover
I didn\'t keep up with the \'racism\' thread but GM enforced de-segregation is foolish, plain and simple.

The only thing I see as being \"foolish\" is to make statements without bothering to at least try to support or even elaorate on them.

Originally posted by Clover
And the food thing,  well none of the races came from Yliakum so none of the food found here would likely be native.

Most of them brought some of their native food with them, although this hardly applies to hard-to-transport goods, like fish. Cattle and seeds, yes, it is even stated in the setting that at least some did.

However, the Ylians are native, so their food is natively to Yliakum as well, and much of it will also have become common to the other Yliaki, simply because their own stuff wasn\'t available in sufficiant quantities in the beginning, and that they couldn\'t bring everything to cultivate, and that they also wouldn\'t have been able to survive solely on their native stuff.

[Clover]

Originally posted by Seytra

Originally posted by Clover
I didn\'t keep up with the \'racism\' thread but GM enforced de-segregation is foolish, plain and simple.

The only thing I see as being \"foolish\" is to make statements without bothering to at least try to support or even elaorate on them.

There isn\'t anything to elaborate on, to force a guild to accept members from other races simply doesn\'t make any sense.  It\'s the guilds decision on whether or not it accepts other races, or it should be.  You don\'t see a group of Teenage Angst Goths considering letting a Prep join just so they could have diversity, or whatever this arguement was trying to accomplish.  Cliques are a part of nature, both human and animal.

[dimaq]

Alright, enough Seytra/Clover arg.... discourse.

point is planeshift could be made to support or oppose segregation based on race.

now if all races were created equal, what would be the point of having them other than aestetic (imo bad)?

if there was alot of segregation it would indeed lead to players selecting their characters just to enable them to complete these and those tasks (also bad).

i would also be wary of \"slightly\" approach (e.g. this race is slightly brighter, that is slightly stronger) - if there are differences they should be well defined and discernable.

so... what would acceptable race differences be? should young characters be sandboxed with their kind?

an alternative approach would be to allow characters to evolve from one skill/stereotype to another, perhaps even allowing to gradually change the way a character looks over time.

[buddha]

Hopefully everyone here agrees: Real racism is a bad bad thing.

But I have some thoughts on racism in PS.  First, Robert Boyd, John Axelrod and Philip Bonnacich have all done studies showing that racism is sort of a \"natural\" thing.  It\'s ugly but true.  A general cause for racism is that it is actually easier to cheat on someone you know rather than someone you don\'t, because (according to Boyd) you know how they will react.  The point is racism is based on individual needs. There are *reasons* people become racist, and in the general case they can be biologically justified (for that, see Boyd and Axelrod).

So, I don\'t see how racism could become embedded in PS.  At first, a bunch of players will say \"we hate Xacha.\"  They will have very little actual reason, and the racial cultures in the game are weak to non-existent.  Therefore, trying to recruit new racists will be very difficult.  It would be hard to convince me to have my character actually \"hate\" Xacha (bad example, I play a Xacha) because I will want to do business with them and go adventuring and such like.

Hmm.  So, can you guys see any way it could actually become embedded?  I don\'t see it.  I think if you let the fools who want to play the PS KKK go ahead and do so, they will quickly find themselves pretty isolated from the rest of the game with little possibility for recruitment.

[Tarachnul]

However, the Ylians are native, so their food is natively to Yliakum as well, and much of it will also have become common to the other Yliaki,

Ylians arent native...(check the history section)

. And the food thing, well none of the races came from Yliakum so none of the food found here would likely be native.

the racces have lived in Yliakum for generations they will have developed new \"native\" foods

...just clarifying...

i think the whole native foods type deal is an interesting prospect and racially independant societies seem natural...also it SEEMS(to me atleast) the devs already have something like that planned (ojaveda as opposed to hydlaa+various allusions towards it)...

regards

-Tarach

[Jakob]

From the PS website     The city of Yliakum is a melting pot of races with different culture and origin, mixed and integrated by living together over the centuries. Racial suspicion and hostility are completely unknown, given that the greater part of people belonging to one race is normally married to someone of another race. Nevertheless, the halfbreeds are considered as separate races. For common genetic rules, an individual will have a prevailing race that will determine its physical traits. For this reason, the main races are relatively pure. In other words, it can\'t happen that the races merge together forming a single mixed race: if someone has a lemur father and an elf mother, he will belong to one race or to the other.

This says, to me that, racism is not a strong possibility, although it\'s possible because some races, like the Klyros, have a strong racial pride, and some people could theororetically take that too far.

[Altharion]

*cough*like the first place winner of the RP award in the ps community awards. *cough*

[bbum]

if their were gnomes, my character would hate them.  there isnt so i have to settle for hating greedy dwarfs. and racial specific food would own.

[Seytra]

@ Tarachnul: You got me, I confused them with the Lemurs, due to the naming association.

@ bbum: that\'s just lame.

It seems to be becoming the general impression that racism and aggression based on this is a common or even major part of the PS setting. I find this sad, considering the history page, as I already stated.
The history states that Yliakums population is highly mixed, yet the char creation has these \"XYZ village\" options which surely speak a different language. Also, there is Ojevada, which also supports the impression that this actually is the norm, and that Yliakum, the melting pot, is the exception, not the rule.

Therefore I am getting the impression that the history and setting, which haven\'t been updated for a long time, are actually quite outdated, and that the goals and intentions, or rather, the visions of the curent developers, have shifted quite a bit from the original ones. In this case, they even have become the opposite.

Sure, the settings team has very few mwmbers, and the rules team has none at all, but does this mean that what was created once isn\'t relevant anymore? And if that is the case, wouldn\'t it be better to at least officially say so? It will be quite a surprise if someone has read the settings and joins the game, only to find that almost all of it is quite different. In this particular case, it will not only be a surprise, but rather a highly negative impression, depending on whether they chose the wrong race.

Sure, it is a tech demo, but considering the vast community that already exists, and the fact that this community will strongly shape the \"final\" one, it seems to be a great mistake to let the gameplay deviate from the description to such extreme an extent.

[buddha]

Seytra, let\'s put aside that \"other\" conversation...

Do you really think segregation is becoming a problem in PS?  I\'m not on as much as I\'d like, and I haven\'t seen it.  I mean, do you have any examples?  I\'d be interested to know who is hating who, as I find this sort of abhorrent.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by buddha
Seytra, let\'s put aside that \"other\" conversation...

Allright, fair enough.

Originally posted by buddha
Do you really think segregation is becoming a problem in PS?  I\'m not on as much as I\'d like, and I haven\'t seen it.  I mean, do you have any examples?  I\'d be interested to know who is hating who, as I find this sort of abhorrent.

I have no actual ingame experience except as described below (4) because I can\'t actually run the client at all due to lack of computing power, but I would be surprised if the forums and the actual game would be very different, especially considering that
1) we already have \"race XYZ only\" guilds, though there are no aggressive ones I know of,
2) there are people asking for more segregation on the wishlist (here)(especially note the \"races who hate eachother\" part)
3) there are people like bbum who just want their chars to hate some race, just for the sake of it
4) the one time I was ingame, almost immediately someone challenged me (I stated this occurance somewhere unrelated already), and when I asked why he did, his reply was very racist, so it\'s either becoming an RP trend, or it\'s being abused for PK. The latter will, however, leave the impression with newbies that this is tolerated or even normal, thereby possible creating such a trend with newbie RPers.

Factoring in that it\'s mostly people who are relatively new, at least on the forums, and also that, until now, I haven\'t seen anything like this in PS (though I\'ve been here for hardly a year), at least not in this quantity, I exect to find it ingame sooner or later, because the setings page is becoming the only thing that might speak against it, while the game implementation, which everyone will be seeing, seems to even encourage it.
Adding the new emphais on combat, this seems to be a dangerous trend. Maybe I\'m just overreacting, but I\'m actually shocked by the amount of people wishing for this sort of thing, or considering it acceptable.

[Incenjucar]

While there\'s a whole lot of politics and psychology involved in the background here... let\'s just leave it at the fact that most RPGs, and, indeed, most media forms that the majority of people are aware of are full of \'black and white\' these days.

You see it in the over-blown \'drow\' thing, especially.

Warcraft and other such, while I understand their reasoning, isn\'t helping.

Heck, sports.  Sports are all about black and white, us and them, victor and victim.

People are, perhaps far too, used to this.

--

Perhaps, if all else fails, explain that the \'drow\' are the monsters in the area, and not the other townsfolk?